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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Kūkai (774–835), founder of the Shingon school of Buddhism, was reimagined in the 1970s–80s amid popular interest in the supernatural as a figure of “magical” authority, showing how such concerns became central to the construction of his image in late postwar culture.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyzes how Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi, 774–835), the historical founder of the Shingon school of Buddhism, was reinvented in late postwar Japan as a figure of “magical” authority. While Kūkai has long been venerated within Shingon as a preeminent esoteric master, and popularly as a “miracle-maker” through the many legends surrounding his figure, the paper argues that the cultural logic through which his authority was made intelligible shifted decisively in the 1970s–80s, when popular fascination with the “occult” and the “supernatural” became a major feature of mass culture. Focusing primarily on the decade after 1973, a year marked both by commemorations tied to the 1200th anniversary of his birth and by the beginning of the serialization of the novelist Shiba Ryōtarō’s widely read "Kūkai no fūkei," and extending through the 1980s, which saw the release by the Tōei Company of "Kūkai," a sectarian-backed blockbuster film centered on his life, the paper traces how the image of this founder circulated across overlapping fields, including mass media as well as academic and semi-academic commentary. In many of these settings, Kūkai was presented less as a sectarian founder or doctrinal transmitter than as an exemplary “adept,” credited with extraordinary powers and a form of hidden knowledge that could function as a critical counterpoint to the perceived limitations of the contemporary mechanistic worldview. The paper examines the narrative and visual strategies through which such “magical” capacities were foregrounded, and how they were made compatible with postwar expectations about science, the mind, and human potential. Rather than treating this “magical Kūkai” as a simple popular distortion of Buddhism, the paper approaches it as a historically specific reclassification of religious authority, arguing that “magic” here is not a timeless residue from the premodern past but a flexible category through which late postwar audiences and commentators negotiated boundaries between religion, science, and the paranormal. By following Kūkai’s movement through postwar media circuits, the paper concludes that the so-called “occult boom” of the 1970s–80s did not merely generate new content about Kūkai; it supplied a new grammar for explaining why he mattered.